Eulogy
by ProcrastinationLyf101
Summary: Peggy Carter gives a eulogy in commemoration of Tony's life when his heart fails shortly after the Civil War. It is addressed to Steve Rogers. The life of a hero is honestly recounted, and a story of bravery, hardship and above all love is told by one person who loves Tony to another person who loves him. (one shot which Tony dies post-CW and Peggy, who survives, honours him)


The Eulogy

I first saw Anthony Edward Stark when he was a newborn in his mother's arms. He was a small baby, and a quiet one. You would never have believed how quiet he was. Maria had worried that there was something wrong with him - he barely cried, she worried, surely that was unhealthy? She read about it, she took him to professionals, she tried to think of a reason for his silence. Could it be deafness? Mental problems? Some kind of pathological muteness?

He was a sickly baby, too. Twice he had to be kept in intensive care, and both times Maria was told that there was a chance she would have to let her first and only baby go. She could not let him go, however. I do not think Howard chose her for anything but her looks - she was, as you can imagine, a beautiful woman, with the exact dark eyes and tanned complexion he would grow up to have, and his smile too, but with long dark hair and a light, youthful gait - and when I first met her, I saw what I suppose he did at first; a beautiful woman, and little else. But when the newborn Tony neared death, I saw she was far more than that. She was a fighter, and a winner by nature, and winners do not do well in helplessness. She sat in that IC room for days, reading medical journals and making calls, never once stopping to eat, sleep or cry.

The first time it happened, Howard was by her side. I saw him carefully control his face, repressing the emotions I know overwhelmed him. I saw him get angry, as he so often did in difficult times; I saw him act in bitterness. At least he was there, and willingly.

The second time, he did not stay at the hospital for long stretches of time. I visited him one day and found him blacked out, drunk, lying on the floor. I heard movement upstairs; I went to investigate and found a half-dressed woman moving in their room. I was shocked; God knows why - Howard wasn't known for his fidelity or strength of will, after all. I suppose I had assumed that even Howard would respect Maria enough, would have loved his newborn son enough, to be at his dying son's side, or at least not to be sleeping with some other woman in the possible last moments of their son's life. In hindsight, I don't think he was there because he was that despicably selfish or heartless, although of course at the time I thought he was. In hindsight, I think he was afraid; afraid of becoming attached to a child whose death would ruin him; afraid that the child's death would destroy the security and even love he had found with Maria; afraid of trusting blindly that his love for his child would not destroy him. He could not cope with that fear. The first time, he forced himself to. The second, he could not.

I think he harbored less admirable fears than that, too. He was afraid that the child would survive. He was afraid of the change his life would suffer, of the weight of a responsibility he had taken on out of a feeling of obligation and not wanting, of the idea of a person genetically half-him.

Needless to say, the baby lived. Weeks later, Maria took him home. I was there at the little celebration, at Howard's request. I mostly remember watching Maria, watching her force the occasion into a genuinely joyful one. She looked exhausted, like she had aged years in the months since Tony's birth.

"I'm so happy for you both," I said to her, in a quiet moment. I could not bring myself to add the reason, which was of course more that Tony had survived than that he had been born at all. Maria looked at me then, and smiled.

"He's a fighter. Just like his father," she said simply. I was surprised to hear that. Howard Stark had once been a fighter, that was true. When we met, he had been young and newly successful, still in awe of that lustrous success. The possibilities for his work had been endless - he was going to change the world, fighting for what he believed in, and the list of things he believed in was endless. He looked only to the future, and that future was boundless. Now, he was on the other side, living that future, and it was both all he had expected and nothing he had dreamed of. He was successful, and had done great things. He hadn't changed the world but he had shaped it. He had a pretty wife and a nice home and a child, and a hole where his heart had once been.

Howard must have detested the little family he found, because consciously or otherwise, he worked hard to destroy it.

Tony's silent infancy was completely reversed about the time he could walk, which was relatively early. It was as though he had decided, still a toddler, that his increasingly absent father would become interested in him if he could appear more like the adults Howard preferred to spend his time with. I have often wondered if he had been intelligent enough to make that strategy at only eight months of age. I don't doubt it. He was potentially among the most intelligent people ever to live; more so than his father.

He was also the loneliest for a very long time.

It was heartbreaking and even fascinating to watch Tony as a young child. He was unimaginably bright, of course, and endearing in his proclivity for mischief. He would break into his father's labs and workshops, and play around for hours on end, eyes bright and twitching and fingers constantly reaching for new tools, new equipment, new possibilities. Sometimes things got broken. I have been told the story of how he had once broken a piece of machinery Howard needed for an upcoming project. Howard had called him a disappointment, a waste of space and weak. Tony was six.

That was also, co-incidentally, the week Tony was sent to boarding school, and I am told that Howard didn't apologize or even say goodbye before he left. Tony must have blamed himself for years. He must have lain awake in an unfamiliar bed, aged only six, and imagined an alternate timeline in which he had just stayed away from the workshop that day, and imagined how Howard would have still loved him and allowed him to stay at home.

Tony grew up quickly away from home. He made friends, a couple of whom genuinely liked and respected him, but the majority of whom did not. He learned to navigate people, believing this a necessary skill to learn given his proven incompetence as a functioning human. He had not been enough for his father, but he knew he was intelligent, and knew he could learn to appear he was worth liking. In his teenage years, he was known for partying hard and often. The habit began an exercise of social skills, in an attempt at training himself into that desirable, likable person he longed to be. He succeeded, both in creating that persona and in burying the sweet, funny, intelligent person he truly was. He also discovered why his father had loved to drink. It offered a solace, an escape from reality.

I think one of the greatest tragedies of his life - and that's saying something - was the few who genuinely loved him didn't know he needed help, or perhaps chose not to know because knowing meant admitting to ourselves how desperately unable they were to help him. If they had tried, perhaps they would have reached out to him, and perhaps he would have listened. We all failed in that sense. I loved him from afar, and respected him, but mostly only because I knew you loved him and I knew how happy he made you - and because he was so like the young Howard had been. His mother did love him unconditionally, and she did her best, but she died too young. Howard loved him in his way, but that could never have been enough. He had two great friends in his life - James Rhodes, who offered him friendship based on real affection and respect, and Pepper Potts, to whom I suspect he was always bound by a desire for friendship and not love. And then, of course, there was you.

When Howard and Maria died, I can only imagine what he felt. For his mother, surely it could have been only unconflicted love and grief. For his father, much more than that. I think the most complicated emotion would have been a sense of incompletion. He had never had a chance to talk to his father honestly, to apologize and ask for apology, to explain and ask for explanation. He had been gone so suddenly, and so had the answers and reassurances he longed for.

I attended the funeral. It was highly attended. I looked around at the people in black and wondered if they would be here, crying over Howard's death, if they had known how Maria and Tony had suffered at his hands. I do not know the full extent to which they suffered, but I saw enough. I heard the words, I saw evidence that the woman I found in Howard's bed was one of many, and I eventually saw the bruises on Tony. Which was why I quietly suggested to Maria that he would be happier away from home.

The rest is well publicized, and I'm sure you know the stories, saw the footage. The first kidnapping, the first suit, Stane's betrayal, Whiplash, the Mandarin, the Chitauri and then of course Ultron leading into the Civil War. That is a well known narrative. Less well known, perhaps, is what those things do to a person. He suffered from stress, and panic, and anxiousness even after the first kidnapping. He couldn't understand why he was alive. He watched people die and knew it was his fault, and he did it again, and again, and again. He became obsessed with righting those wrongs, so much so that his own life and soul ceased to matter. He would save people, he would do what was right, he would make sure his life had a purpose. He was always a strong, fierce, independent, funny, indomitable and selfless person, but the trauma he suffered twisted those qualities until they began to destroy him. He became mentally compromised. I think he would have liked to drink himself to death, and only refrained from doing so because he could not save the world in death. I know he stopped being able to sleep, stopped wanting to eat, and spent most of his time working or drinking. Howard had hated the world and lashed out at it, because he could not live with himself. Tony hated himself and hurt himself, because he could not understand the world.

That was why he was able to give his life so thoughtlessly in New York. But, of course, he didn't die. He lived and it destroyed him further. He struggled with reality itself. How did he know he was alive? Why would he be? _How could he be?_ His dreams were feverish and haunted. He told me about it. He told me that he had died a million times in dreams, and he had watched people he loved die a million times more. He told me he had woken and not known where he was. Then, he said, you had always been there. You had explained to him calmly and quietly. _This is life. We're alive. I love you. I'm not going to leave. You don't have to be scared._

From that trauma and confusion, from the mental torturedness of a man who has caused and experienced unimaginable suffering and has nobody to reassure him that these things were not always his fault, came Ultron. The idea of a simple solution to all of his suffering was inevitably irresistible to him. He didn't tell you about it, because he knew you would object, because he knew you wouldn't understand. He didn't tell me about it, for the same reasons. I know him well enough that I know how he would have justified it to himself. He would've thought that if you hated him for not telling you about Ultron, that would be the price he would pay. He thought, I can save the world by sacrificing the love of the one person I care about, so long as that person survives. That is the mind of a man displaced from reality.

He loved you, of course. He would have loved you in any world, in every way, whatever you did. I think this world was one of those in which he loved you despite it being impossible. When you chose Bucky, even after what Bucky had done, he could have hated you. When you physically beat him to the ground, he could have stopped loving you, but he didn't. I worry that he knew how to love you because Howard had already taught him how to love someone who was destroying him. I worry that when you lost your mind for Bucky, the way you hurt Tony was unmistakably like the way Howard did.

That isn't fair. I know you tried your best. I know he was never easy to love.

Tony was a troubled man, and you are too. I don't believe you loved each other because of that, because neither of you ever were your troubles. When I first knew you, in the 1940s, you had nothing, but that was not who you were. You were a fighter, every inch of you, and you were brave, and more importantly you were kind, and you were loyal, and you were funny in your way. You had a beautiful smile and wore newspapers in your shoes to make them fit, and you were scared half of the time but fearless always. That is who you are now, and who you should try to be.

He came to visit me in my last days. We had had a good relationship when he was a boy, but only in his last years did he turn to me as a friend. He told me everything, and I think that's because of what I represented. I was his last connection to Howard, to you, and to his mother, the woman who had loved with every inch of her soul the sickly baby whose death would destroy her life. I don't think he spoke to any of you the way he did to me. I wish the three of you had heard those stories, stories of wanting to be dead and not being able to sleep and never crying, not in decades, until it twisted his mind and he couldn't breathe for it.

Anthony Edward Stark died from a cardiac arrest six months after the final time you saw each other - which, of course, was the end of the civil war, when you drove a vibranium shield into his fragile, damaged chest. For many of those six months, he was alone. I know that you left him a contact number, but I also knew that _you_ knew fully well he would never call it. I wish I had lived to say goodbye, to ease him out of life. His old friend James Rhodes waited outside the room, and Ms Potts booked a flight to New York as soon as she found out he was in hospital, but she was too late. Poor Pepper Potts. I think she saw in Tony what he saw in her - friendship and camaraderie and someone worth respect. I think they were happy together, for a while. But she didn't love him, not even as friends do. I did love him, but I offered friendship too late. Maria loved him, but she struggled with so much that even before her death, love was all she had. You loved him - I truly believe that you did, and do - as a lover and as a friend. But you did not choose him in the end.

We should have all been there to say goodbye. Although, that's not quite right, is it? It was right that Howard and Maria passed before he did. No parent should bury their child. But they shouldn't have gone so soon, and neither should he.

You know I have loved you, Steve. You are every inch the good man I loved, and for every difficulty and pain that warped Tony, you suffered similarly. But you are alive, and we all have an unfortunate habit of honouring people only when the worst has happened. I can't pretend that you didn't hurt him, but I can't pretend that he didn't learn to live without you, and I can't pretend that you could've made him happy by loving him, because love doesn't cure illness. You cannot be blamed for the worst of his hurt, but you can be faulted for knowing it was there and choosing not to fight that battle with him. But none of that matters now, anyway. The fact is that now the worst has happened, for all of us, and it is Tony's time to be honoured. He didn't get enough of it in life, that's for goddamn sure.

I imagine that in a different life, you chose him. I imagine that you fought together for years, that you were each other's best friend and protector, that for years you continued to love the brilliant boy who would give his soul to save the world, and that for years he was allowed to love the fighter from Brooklyn who would sacrifice the world for what was right. I believe that in some universe, in some corner of reality, you loved each other long, and hard, until a timely end.

But endings are never timely, are they? Nor do they define a life. I don't believe in happy endings, and neither do you. Perhaps when you drove the plane into the water, you thought of your own life, and one day - in the distant future, given the apparent effect of the serum on aging - you will think of your life together before your own, final, end. Perhaps when you heard the news of Tony's death, you thought of his. I hope you don't, and didn't, and won't, measure those lives by endings. Value the good in life, because God knows none of us got enough of it.

The fact is, that when you fell in love with each other, I saw the way you would smile to yourself when you thought nobody could see, and I saw the way his eyes were brighter, and I noticed the bruises on your neck and reflected that it was nice to finally see marks inflicted by something other than violence, and remembered anew what a wonderful thing it is to be young, and happy, and in love. I was never afraid to love, despite being hesitant to show it. If there is one thing I am glad about in my life, it is that I allowed myself to love, and to be loved. I loved you both - you as a lover at first, and then when you came back as a dear friend, and Tony as a godchild at first, and later a friend too. You deserved each other, and not what happend. But Tony's story wasn't a tragedy. He did great things, and was always a good man, and was better than Howard in every way.

And, of course, he _was_ loved. Not widely, of course. But by a few, and deeply, and relentlessley, and endlessley.

Tony was a man of the future, which is perhaps why it stings so acutely that he did not live out the future he envisioned. The things he suffered are things he would have destroyed himself to amend, but instead the heart which failed him by being too loving and bright and wonderful, also failed him in his moment of dying, and that's how he died, in his sleep, his heart failing him one last time. But perhaps it shouldn't hurt that he didn't achieve that future. Maybe he would've looked back at his life and seen that he looked to the future because he was afraid of looking at the present too closely and seeing only disappointment. Maybe if he had looked at the present more closely he would've seen that it was every part the beautiful future he envisioned - it was often a present in which he was of service, and loved for his brilliant mind and heart, and driven. Throughout his life, despite his many mistakes, those were always in his present. And for years to come, he will remain of service and his heart and mind will continue to benefit our lives and world, and he will live on, Tony Edward Stark, a living legacy living alone but at peace beyond time and space, until we too die and join him among the ranks of the noble and the kind and the brave.


End file.
